Harper’s dishonesty on display in latest Pentagon papers on F-35

The serial dishonesty of the Harper government was back on display last week in pink neon for all to see: the F-35 has surreptitiously re-appeared on the government’s agenda and once again the loser is Parliament.

According to a Canadian Press story by Murray Brewster based on a Pentagon leak, the Harper government plans to buy four F-35s and slip the acquisition into the current fiscal year. In order to get the controversial jet by 2016 or 2017, Canada has to provide the F-35 Project Office with a letter of intent by mid-November. All this is documented in a U.S. Department of Defense slide show. Not a peep in Ottawa.

Sooner or later, it is going to sink in that it doesn’t matter what this prime minister says. All that counts is what he wants. Harper’s dictatorship of marketing is picking up speed as we get closer to a federal election and our central institution, Parliament, is playing a profoundly minor role in the affairs of the nation.

Conservative MPs seemed in the dark about the back-door procurement, while the Opposition was blindsided.

No one should be surprised. Stephen Harper has taken to announcing things like a U.S. president rather than introducing legislation in the House of Commons or holding debates — whether the issue is war or warplanes. Tokenism at the eleventh hour is the rule of the day.

Remember, this is the prime minister announced the changes to the Old Age Supplement while he was hobnobbing with the world’s richest and most powerful in Davos, Switzerland. He first talked about deeper engagement in the third Iraq War while speaking to a business audience in New York. Most recently, he mused aloud about significant tax changes very publicly, but the measure has yet to be brought to Parliament for a debate on its merits.

With the credibility of his government in tatters over the F-35, Stephen Harper simply threw the Batmobile into reverse. A new story appeared.”

To Harper, as his former privacy commissioner Robert Marleau put it, Parliament is a minor obstacle to his executive modus operandi. This prime minister has it constitutionally backwards. He thinks Canadians elect governments when, actually, they elect parliaments.

Not for nothing has his record for submitting unconstitutional legislation to the Supreme Court been without precedent in Canadian history.

Not for nothing does he have the worst-ever record for resorting to time allocation to minimize any meaningful debate in the Commons.

And not for nothing does a legendary former House Speaker insist Harper is still in contempt of parliament because he never did release those 40,000 Afghan detainee documents to a parliamentary committee as he was ordered to do – only 4,000 of them.

So why is he still in contempt? The direction to release the documents was done by an Order of the House, and survived the dissolution of parliament for the 2011 election, or at least it did in the learned opinion of Peter Milliken, the dean of Speakers in western parliamentary democracies, and the longest serving Speaker in Canadian history.

It is widely acknowledged — but sadly accepted by many as the new normal — that Stephen Harper has put us firmly into the post-democratic age.

One of the ways is to force phone-book-size omnibus bills through parliament, making it impossible to properly scrutinize new legislation — resulting in what former CPC MP Brent Rathgeber calls “irresponsible government”.

Who ever heard of budgets without planning and priority reports? If the political opposition doesn’t have the information to rationally critique the budget, they simply can’t fulfill their primary duty as watchdogs of public spending. The entire Canadian public suffers when the Opposition can’t hold the government’s feet to the fire.

Another method is to withhold or distort information, which leaves critics in the dark. That’s why the Harper government dumped the long-form census, shutting off an important source of independent information vital to making informed policy decisions. That’s why it muzzles scientists, who are now drawing up in battle order against Harper for the next election, despite a history and tradition of political neutrality. And quite often, the Harper government simply lies, which brings us back to the F-35.

There was a time when Stephen Harper himself talked on the record of having a “contract” to buy 65 F-35 fighters, a mantra that was repeated by then-Defence Minister Peter MacKay and the calamitous Julian Fantino.

That was before they got caught with pants aflame and Canadians were mooned with the ugly truth. Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that the government’s costing for the F-35 — supposedly a mere $15 billion — was astronomically and deliberately out of whack. The true cost of this expensive and troubled experimental jet was $25 billion, 40 per cent higher than Harper was willing to admit publicly.

National Defence HQ knew the real price in 2010 when it decided to purchase the Lockheed Martin “stealth” jet and the cabinet knew that too when it announced its intention to buy the F-35 on July 16th, 2010.

The only people who didn’t know, including during the writ period in the 2011 election, were the Canadian people. It was yet another example of voter fraud, deliberately programming voters with false information. And of course, that was the election where Harper achieved his majority government.

As former Auditor General Sheila Fraser put it, the F-35 debacle was akin to the Ad Sponsorship scandal. It was not that the process was murky. Rather, there were clear rules that were solidly in place and known by everyone. They had simply been ignored at every level, including the federal cabinet.

Making the whole thing much worse, the F-35 was being purchased without a competitive bidding process as a sole-source acquisition. That is the fastest way to add 20 per cent to the price of anything in a major procurement.

No one has yet explained why DND disobeyed a direct order of an officer of parliament, Kevin Page, who demanded that the department release the true cost of the F-35. That request came in 2011, nearly a year after DND knew that the full cost of the jet fleet would be at least $25 billion. Yet NDHQ kept the true number a secret, and misled Page with a price-tag of just $14.7 billion.

Both the parliamentary budget officer and the auditor general put a quick end to the government’s charade by the numbers.

With the credibility of his government in tatters over the F-35, Stephen Harper simply threw the Batmobile into reverse. A new story appeared. Now there was no “contract” and no decision. People would just have to get over the fact that their prime minister had once insisted the exact opposite.

Instead, the Harper government hit the “reset” button. Now there was a miraculous seven-point plan to select a new fighter jet for Canada and the Harper government promised more “supervision” of those sneaky bureaucrats over at DND, who the butt-coverers from PMO say were responsible for the whole mess. Some in the media even talked about the program being cancelled. Perhaps we would choose a different jet after all if a real competition were held. Bless them in their innocence.

It was of course just public relations nonsense and marketing, like so much that comes out of this government. Stephen Harper never cancels anything he wants, he merely re-groups and waits for a subsequent sneak attack.

He has done it on internet snooping legislation, which he can’t seem to decide exactly what it is designed to protect us from — child-pornographers or terrorists.

He did it on the laughably described “private member’s” initiative, Bill 377, which is being sent back to the Senate without earlier amendments, the better to continue his war against unions.

And now he has done it again on the F-35.

Nothing has been broached in parliament about this potentially imminent order of a jet that is grossly over-budget, grossly delayed in production, and mired in operational problems. If the story is accurate, there never was a meaningful review of the F-35 decision of 2010 — another lie.

After CP broke the story, defence minister Rob Nicholson was not in Question Period last Friday. But the government once again played silly bugger on the F-35 file when Bernard Trottier, the minister’s parliamentary secretary, rose to answer in his place.

Refusing to address the information in the Pentagon leak, he simply parroted the speaking points that no decision had been made to replace Canada’s fleet of CF-18s. Does anyone believe that if the Harper government wants to buy four of these jets that the F-35 will not be the choice to replace the CF-18? This is simply vintage Harper — getting what he wants by other means.

It is interesting to note that four Lockheed Martin F-35Bs were set to debut in the United Kingdom at the Farnborough air show this summer. They were within days of heading across the Atlantic when the engine of an F-35A caught fire preparing for takeoff on June 23, 2014 and the pilot had to “egress” from the aircraft.

Operational commanders then scrubbed the trans-Atlantic flight for the four F-35Bs, which are not even expected to debut at the Paris air show next year. The Pentagon banned reporters from asking questions about the decision to bail out of Farnborough and the mishap involving the $98-million-per-unit fighter jet.

No wonder Harper is so impressed with these guys.

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Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, recently hit number one on Maclean’s magazine’s top ten list for Canadian non fiction.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Michael Harris is a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His nine books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry and three of his books have been made into movies. His book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, was a number one best-seller.